Cause Marketing - Capital One - Hassle Free Giving

Cause marketing has become a proven model for companies to drive positive brand perception, loyalty, and a distinguished corporate status. An article on Forbes does a great job at outlining the attributes that can help increase the performance of an organization’s cause marketing campaign: recognizable authenticity, charity benefits, branded products, multiple events, and press coverage. In my opinion, the cause marketing campaigns have the most impacts when organizations are able to connect social value for the consumers and also bring together the customer, employees, and the distribution network involved in the value chain.

Capital One, a major national financial institution developed a program “Give” where it created a donation platform for both its customers and non-customers to make donations to their favorite charities without a fee. The list of the charities that were able to participate in this platform was quite exhaustive – a whopping 1.2 million verified charities. The site offers easy to find ways to look up participating charities based on areas of interest, keywords, and zip code.

The company developed a no-hassle giving site, which allowed consumers to make fee-free donations. Hurricane Sandy disaster relief was one of the few tragedies to benefit from such a platform. Capital one committed $1 million to relief efforts out of which it matched up to $200,000 from its customers. Capital One partnered with Network for Good and GuideStar in order to build customer confidence for generating donations.

Network for Good is a non-profit organization which took the responsibility for disbursements of donations made by customers to their favorite charities. GuideStar provided access to an exhaustive database of public charities within the US that are also registered with the IRS. A combination of two credible sources – legal charity and assurance of disbursement made a compelling proposition for the customer to act and Capital One waived/covered all transaction fees for the donations. This was the perfect example of engaging all the players in the value-chain and creating social value that is sustainable.